Breaking: From BEST to Worst In Less Than a Day

Well now: Richard Muller’s sneak peak of his latest findings from the BEST project due out tomorrow have run headlong into Anthony Watts’ latest study of the surface temperature record, posted up on his WattsUpWithThat site at 3 pm eastern time today. Watts’ conclusion is indeed s bombshell if it proves out: that the U.S. surface temperature rise has been overestimated by a factor of two:

The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward.

ClimateDepot has more, and a good roundup of reaction rolling in already. Now, the mischievous part of the Watts release is that appears to build upon some of Muller’s work, and Watts’s decision to release a pre-publication of his new study apes the exact same process Muller has used:

The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller, of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project in a June 2011 interview with Scientific American’s Michael Lemonick in “Science Talk”, said:

“I know that is prior to acceptance, but in the tradition that I grew up in (under Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez) we always widely distributed “preprints” of papers prior to their publication or even submission. That guaranteed a much wider peer review than we obtained from mere referees.”

So hey—if Muller can do it, why not Watts? If nothing else, Watts is having a lot of fun aping Muller here, and I expect the climateers will go to DefCon1 on this whole matter. If nothing else, this will expose a lot of double-standards, but as we always say, without double-standards, the Left wouldn’t have any standards at all.